a brief explanation:
in 2020 i started a new blog, slow fade, and wrote five things for it, then Chris Goode died, and then i struggled to write anything at all. as i slowly move towards being able to publish the text about working with him that i've been writing, i'm also rethinking where i publish what online, and in particular rethinking what slow fade might be as a space: or rather, how it might genuinely be the new space, for me, free of Chris, that i wanted it to be. so i'm moving a few posts that i published on slow fade here, which feels more their natural home actually.
this post actually features two posts in one. the first was called open for business, and was first published on 28 January 2020. the second was called scattered thoughts of a busy fortnight and was originally published on 28 February 2020.
*
open for business
“Academics, activists, artists, and cartoon characters have long been on a quest to articulate an alternative vision of life, love, and labor and to put such a vision into practice. Through the use of manifestoes, a range of political tactics, and new technologies of representation, radical utopians continue to search for different ways of being in the world and being in relation to one another than those already prescribed for the liberal and consumer subject.” J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure
Add
to the first list, people who write about theatre.
Add
to the second, theatre blogs.
*
I’ve
read 17 reviews of Athena Stevens’ play Scrounger and a lot of them
describe it as an uncomfortable experience. This is how [my]
excellent, astute [friend] Rosemary Waugh unpacks that discomfort, in
her review for Time Out:
“The
brilliance of Stevens’s work is that it directly angles its
comments about how disabled people are routinely treated at those
lovely, left-leaning, Guardian-reading, petition-signing people most
likely to be sitting in the audience (*waves*). It doesn’t, in
other words, allow the ‘nice’ people to feel good about
themselves by placing the blame on the Tories, the Daily Mail or
outdated attitudes. It asks if your well-meaning bullshit is
precisely that: bullshit.
And
that’s something so little of the theatre that’s on stage is
doing right now. Instead of preaching to the converted and inviting
everyone inside for an intellectual circle jerk, it sinks its teeth
into the hypocrisies of people who tell themselves they’re doing
good without actually doing anything. It’s theatre that’s
designed to make you feel properly uncomfortable, and then to do
something about that.”
What
follows is in no way a dig at Rosemary, it’s an open question about
the purpose of theatre criticism, and the ways in which it might be
“doing something”.
I
found Scrounger a desperately uncomfortable experience, for two
reasons:
1.
On walking into the auditorium the usher said in a peremptory tone
that the benches seat five people. The benches in the Finborough
Theatre do not fit five adult humans. They fit 4.5. I know because I
was the 0.5 barely lodged, like the thin end of a wedge, in the
middle of a row. Any fat person attempting to sit in one of these
benches will be made to feel like shit – which is no different from
any other public space, but that doesn’t mean it should pass
without comment.
2.
After watching Stevens, who has athetoid cerebral palsy, being
supported by her co-performer to leave the room, I checked the
Finborough’s accessibility policy. In a classic pass of the buck,
it says: “We regret that the Pub no longer provides disabled toilet
facilities.” It does not, apparently, regret that: “There are 23
steps to the theatre (including a turn in the stairs).”
Precisely
two of the reviews I read thought to comment on this.
“What
an indication of the shit so many disabled people have to deal with
day in, day out,” marvels Simon Gwynn in Exeunt (a review that made
me proud to write for them, tbh).
“Perhaps the reassessment of privilege and re-evaluation of
conflict avoidance that it instigates will reach the pub downstairs,
which has turned its disabled toilet into a kitchen,” suggests
Cindy Marcolina in Broadway World.
Perhaps.
But not if there’s no outcry about it. Or, as Andrew Curtis puts it
in his review for London Pub Theatres Magazine:
“The main target of Stevens’ ire are the people around her, who
are seen as complicit with the bureaucratic forces she is fighting.
This extends to the audience. Goodwill alone is not enough, the
important thing is to take a stand. But who present is going to do
that?”
*
One
of my favourite pieces of work I did last year was an essay for the
Bruntwood Prize Write a Play blog about the well-made play
– why people continue to write them, and why people who don’t
write them struggle for oxygen in the UK’s deeply conservative and
risk-averse theatre industry. Scrounger is not a well-made play, in
ways I find appealing. It’s a one-woman roar at social injustice
with a second performer sketching in the world around her: selfish
best friend, boyfriend put to the test, evasive bureaucracy,
subsidiary characters including Uber driver and human rights
campaigner, both depicted with an unnecessary grotesquerie. But
Scrounger also reminded me of a pertinent question raised by Vicky
Featherstone, artistic director at the Royal Court, when I
interviewed her for that piece: “What’s the difference that turns
something into a piece of theatre, that could be told better in a
documentary or a really good news article?”
Stevens,
her co-performer Leigh Quinn, her director Lily McLeish, the rest of
the design team, everyone involved in this production works hard at
making that difference. The fact that Scrounger is on at the
Finborough means that a lot of new people – me included – will
have found out about this based-on-true-events story of the typical
neglect experienced by people who are disabled by their environment,
by the lack of thought around access that typifies social design. But
if the Finborough itself isn’t accessible – if it isn’t
possible for someone who uses a wheelchair to see this show and think
yes, that is something I recognise, there on that stage – isn’t
the very fact that Scrounger is performed there exacerbating typical
neglect? What if the programming of this play, and its reception,
aren’t part of the solution, but part of the problem?
*
I
didn’t use to think about any of this. Then I saw Jess Thom, aka
Tourettes Hero, perform
Backstage in Biscuit Land, and everything that had been invisible to
me – including my own unconscious discrimination – was suddenly
pressingly present. The number of theatres in London (let alone the
UK) that exclude wheelchair users. The miniscule proportion of
performances that are relaxed. Wanting to support Jess, I’ve
written a few times about the necessity of making theatre more
accessible, most recently for Exeunt, a piece also
partly inspired by Kirsty Sedgman’s vigorously argued book The Reasonable Audience,
particularly this bit (which I’ve had to lift from the Exeunt piece
while her book practises its invisibility trick):
“If
only one disabled person is excluded from theatre, that is still a
fundamental failure of social morality.” After all, “how can a
place claim to be ‘public space’ if only certain subjectivities
are afforded equitable access?” Theatre, Sedgman says, might
transform “individuals” into “publics”, but: “what good is
a public if not actually representative of the public?”
Neil
McPherson, artistic director at the Finborough, does seem to have
given these questions some thought. In an interview with the i paper,
who contacted him for a news report with the headline “A disabled
actor has to crawl up the theatre's stairs so she can perform her
play” (and why isn’t that observation in any of the reviews?),
McPherson says:
“We
recently spent a great deal of time and not a little expense to
source the only stair lift that would be practical within the
confines of our 152 year old building, and made a funding application
to have it installed. We are a registered charity but do not receive
any public funding of any kind. Sadly, our application for a stair
lift was turned down flat with no reason given by the Royal Borough
of Kensington and Chelsea.”
The
thing is, it’s really easy to say that these things are someone
else’s fault. We all do it – I do it. The problem I’m railing
against is a collective one, that might be summarised as: “oh well,
we tried, change is hard, so let’s carry on with business as
usual”.
*
I am
tired of business as usual.
In
2011 I started blogging from a place of quiet hopefulness: that I
might be able to write about work or people that were being ignored,
looking from a different angle, shining a different light. That blog
emerged with my own emergence, from a four-year period of
disenchantment in which I saw almost no theatre, during which I felt
that pretty much everything I was seeing was lying to me. By which I
mean, lying about the way in which theatre brings people together to
tell them something important about the world and humanity and this
fraught fucking business of being alive.
This
blog is different. It begins with me back in that place of disillusion,
a bleak mood exacerbated by where we are politically, by terror and
disgust at society shaped by fascist-leaning Conservatism,
intractable racism and rising transphobia, but also by fury at the
theatre industry specifically, its obstinate refusal to address
systemic issues that define what is seen and by whom. And of course I
know that there are individuals out there working hard to address
these things: whether artistic directors like Annabel Turpin,
community directors like Naomi Alexander, producers like Louise Blackwell, artists like Selina Thompson, critics like Bridget Minamore, independents like Lily Einhorn and Rajni Shah, or
belligerents like Alan Lane (yes, that title is deliberate and
intended to amuse). If these people were running the industry –
running the world – we’d all be better off.
Despite
their commitment and extraordinary work, the big overarching picture
remains roughly the same. The past decade has seen incremental shifts
for sure, with people like Jess Thom finding a national platform to
campaign for change – but what I hear those voices saying time and
again is: this is not enough. The changes are too slow and too timid
and too small to make a meaningful dent in the white supremacist,
capitalist, patriarchal power structures of British theatre.
I don’t say any of this like I’m not complicit. I am. There are
small ways in which I try to make change (Theatre Club – email me
if you don’t know what this is – is one of them), but there are
much bigger ways in which I don’t bother. This is what
complicity looks like in my case, how it plays out in my work and
interactions with others: a lack of commitment that comes from not
caring enough, a
lack of compassion that comes from self-absorption, and a lack of
rigour that results in intellectual dishonesty.
A
new blog is so not the answer. And yet, as 2020 dawned I speed-read
Megan Vaughan’s book Theatre Blogging and
felt briefly, giddily enthused. In her introduction she writes: “I
am not here to proclaim blogging the saviour of theatre. With its
high prices, limited audience capacities, and concentration in a
handful of wealthy Western cities, it is very possible that theatre
cannot be saved. And any partial redemption will surely require a sea
change in the way work is commissioned, funded and cast, plus mass
resignations in its major venues and drama schools.” What she does
argue, however, is that theatre blogging has “established the
conditions in which new voices and perspectives could be heard,
outmoded practices could be questioned, and fresh ideas and
initiatives championed”.
--
PS/update: Athena Stevens has written a response to this post ontwitter, which I haven’t been permitted to reprint in full here but
please do read it. You can add to the list above of ways in which I’m
complicit in the inertia that allows structural injustice to continue
unimpeded “a lack of vigour that makes my work substantial as
confetti that melts in water” - Athena’s phrase and, I think we
can all agree, an exquisite one.
Athena’s
thread mentions four articles lobbying the theatre industry to get
its shit together on access, linking to this one in the Stage; the
inews one is linked above, another is in the Guardian. There’s also
this piece by Lyn Gardner talking about access with Jess Thom. Bring on the changes: they can't come soon enough.
*
scattered thoughts of a busy fortnight
In the fortnight after publishing the first post on here, I –
1.
held
a class in theatre criticism with five students on an MA programme,
looking at reviews of Scrounger, waiting until the end to tell them
who the writers were or where they were published. It’s a super
interesting way of thinking about criticism, because it quickly
exposes the similarities in length, style and tone across newspaper,
journal and online criticism: a surprising level of conformity. (The
group thought six of the 11 reviews I gave them to read were
published in newspapers; in fact it was only two.) We talked a lot
about one review that took umbrage at there not being captions for
Scrounger, how the writer probably thought they were standing up for
access needs, but in fact came across as appallingly insensitive,
criticising the disabled performer rather than the need for
captioning across theatre. All of my insides squirmed, because Athena
Stevens, creator and star of Scrounger, had called me out on twitter
for making exactly the same mistake.
She
was right to do so. There’s a lack of diligence in the argument I
made in that first post: I’d intended to question the purpose of
theatre criticism, and instead questioned the right of a
theatre-maker to choose where to position their work for maximum
impact; I’d intended to challenge theatre as an industry for
perpetuating ableist architecture, but instead criticised a single
theatre for programming work by a disabled artist; I’d intended to
write about my own apathy, but in doing so diminished another’s
vital act of protest. I’m grateful to Athena for taking the time to
respond and to challenge the flaws and lapses of judgement in that
writing, which opened up this space for me to reconsider.
At
the same time, I note in Athena’s twitter thread her disdain for my
“review”: her quote marks, intentionally scathing. It amuses me,
because I wasn’t writing a review: I was writing about the
social/cultural context around her work. The conformity of criticism
across online and printed media alike narrows perceptions among
readers of what a response to a piece of theatre should or could look
like, a bias I’m committed to challenging and changing, same as
Athena is committed to challenging and changing what finds a home on
stage – the two endeavours intertwined.
2.
went
to Devoted & Disgruntled, a big annual theatre gathering that I
was going to miss this year on account of everything I wrote in that
first post about being worse than disgruntled: disenchanted and
disillusioned. (“Theatre-weary”, as one of the MA students put
it.) In the garish orange book about parenting, therapist Philippa
Perry advises people to “feel with not deal with”: to listen to
problems, feel with them, but not attempt to compliment or hush them
away. A D&D conversation led by producer Jo Mackie, on whether
she could effect more positive change in the world by leaving theatre
altogether, did exactly that “feeling with” my own theatre
heart-ache, so tenderly I wanted to do a little cry. And when
wonderful theatre-maker Aleasha Chaunte joined the discussion, and
described the Humanise Community Film Club she’s set up in
Liverpool, offering a film, a meal and a conversation to refugee
groups (and general audiences who pay to attend), I actually did a
big cry, overwhelmed with admiration and hope and a sense of
connection.
As I
moved between conversations – and it really was an excellent D&D
year, with discussions on fighting fascism and posh crisps as a
symbol of the gentrification of theatre, both led by director Anna
Himali Howard; on theatre that challenges oppression led by tiata
fahodzi’s Nathalie Ibu; and on responses to climate change led by
sustainability specialist Nina Klose – I started thinking about
this blog, and my hopes for it. How I want it to be attentive to
questions of accessibility and who is in the room (not just in the
audience or on stage but across the entire team making the work); how
I want to interrogate what I’m choosing to write about and how; and
how I might be more transparent, whether about finances, troublesome
biases, or where I’ve gone wrong.
I
talked this through a bit with Lyn Gardner, particularly a nagging
difficulty: that it’s hard to hold oneself to account without it
becoming a judgement on others’ choices too. As an example: I think
the theatre industry generally is not doing enough to ensure it’s
fully accessible; I think I as a writer am not doing enough to demand
that theatre is fully accessible – can I leave it at that, without
turning that statement into an indictment on other writers? On recent
evidence, apparently not. And maybe that’s fine: I’m a distant
admirer of Sara Ahmed’s principle of feminist killjoy and being
actively difficult. But it’s not like I’m some authority on
social ethics, and any method of holding myself to account has to
also account for the fact that I still have much to learn.
Last
year I was interviewed by Verity Healey for this essay on theatre criticism, and she asked me whether I thought critics could sign up
to a manifesto similar to that created by Milo Rau for NT Gent, an
idea I found disorienting: me and Dominic Cavendish signing up to the
same manifesto? I don’t think so. But maybe there’s another way.
At D&D I started thinking that I could follow in the footsteps of
theatre companies Action Hero and Sleep Dogs, and write an ethical
policy or code or promise or pledge for this blog. Something to
encourage me to think more deeply about the systems within which I’m
complicit; something I can use to shape how this blog might be – in
Slung Low’s excellent phrase – kind and useful in the ways it
seeks change. It’ll take me a while to put together; this stands as
a promise to make sure it gets done.
3.
wrote
a rapturous review for Exeunt that almost says what I wanted to say
but not quite. I wanted to think about the ways in which
dancer/choreographers Louise Ahl and Julie Cunningham claim the
(mostly white male) canon of classical ballet music for themselves,
appropriating a status otherwise denied them. I wanted to say that
Cunningham’s version of The Fire Bird felt huge, and in its
hugeness oddly elusive to me. There’s a brilliant tweet by
performance-maker Rachel Mars that gets much closer to its
expansiveness than I could: “it’s proper dance,” she wrote,
“with proper orchestral music and it’s also Freddie Mercury &
queers posturing in smoking areas & gaykids trying to get out of
forests & winky apple eating & then suddenly we’re all
airborne”. A whole queer life and community and culture threaded in
its steps.
And
I wanted to say that Louise Ahl’s Lite Metle gave me eerie
delighted flashbacks to a show I’d seen the week before at the
Barbican, Child by Peeping Tom. It’s the third part in a trilogy by
Peeping Tom also seen at the Barbican over the past couple of years,
preceded by Father, my least favourite, a dour comedy set in an old
people’s home; and Mother, which lives in my memory as a set of
uncanny images: an art gallery that is also a morgue that is also a
hospital, a recording studio glowing blood-spatter red, a naked
statue that moves and breathes, a security guard who slurps through
the wall, a body that drowns in the sound of water, a love affair
with a coffee machine… altogether, a work of startling mystery and
beauty.
Child
didn’t quite inspire the giddy amazement of Mother but came close.
The set is enormous, forest on one side, craggy rock on the other,
and in between a grown-up pretending to be a child, initially in that
slightly annoying way adults have of gurning and curving their
shoulders and rucking a skirt to convey untidy smallness. She cycles
on a too-small bike in the open space of the forest encountering
scenes of unsettling, surrealist disturbance: a forest ranger who
shoots a tourist at close range; a spiky deer with skittery
stilettoed limbs who loses her head; a woman who pulls up a baby tree
by its roots and feeds its tangled branches from her breast. At one
point a crack in the rock bursts open and a series of pink-hued
spiders pour out: naked humans scuttling crab-like, stomachs up and
shoulders twist-jointed and rubber masks over their skulls
repositioning faces at the backs of their heads. Gradually the child
becomes overwhelmed by emotion – triggered not by shooting the
tourist herself, again and sickeningly again, his body flipping like
in a video game with every bullet, a sight she takes gruesome
pleasure in; what actually triggers her is jealousy at the sight of
another child with its caring parents – and she starts to wail:
only in Peeping Tom’s heightened universe, the sound of tantrum is
operatic, as in actually sung by a mezzo-soprano. An equation of
exactitude.
At
the end I bumped into Daniel Pitt, director of Chisenhale Dance
Space, and we agreed that artists in the UK just don’t get the
resources – of money or space or time – to make work at that kind
of scale. Watching Louise Ahl, I thought about how there’s another
resource denied to artists working here: belief that their work is
ambitious or expansive enough to merit that material investment. It’s
such a pernicious, diminishing assumption, and so much potential is
thwarted by it.
A
work can be small and still huge, holding within its span a whole
queer world like Cunningham, or wild imagined new worlds like Ahl.
It’s vital to appreciate that too. But what I wouldn’t give to
see Ahl unleashed across a stage as big as the Barbican’s main
theatre, her imagination unbound.
4.
went
to Brighton for a bit of the New Queers on the Block weekender, to
see Oozing Gloop’s Glooptopia and host a Theatre Club afterwards.
New Queers on the Block are fantastic: based at the Marlborough
Theatre in Brighton, they put proper funding into supporting queer
artists to make new work, big work, brave work, and then supporting
audiences to come see it, talk about it, and talk beyond it too.
This
was the first time I’ve seen Oozing Gloop, self-styled “world’s
leading green autistic drag queen”, and to be honest I was a bit
apprehensive: all their promotion photos are loud and garish and make
me feel very old and very normative. But within a few minutes of
Glooptopia starting I was charmed and beaming. The utopia Gloop
envisages – outlined on stage and in a ferociously yellow fanzine
handed out during the show – is the commucratic revolution:
commucracy to differentiate it from dictatorial Soviet-style
communism and capitalist democracy alike. I mean, I have a few issues
with details of process and vision, but sign me up basically. The
thesis and concept are presented on stage through a lo-fi
presentation of long words on big white sheets of card, like a
craftivist powerpoint presentation, which could have been dry as
fuck, only Gloop has their face painted green, wears an ornate hat
marked M on one side and F the other, and runs through flamboyant
costume changes with more panache than Cher performing at Wembley Arena (see the link: I know whereof I speak). It’s equal parts
silliness and scouring social critique and sent me bouncing into
Theatre Club with all the energy of a shaken bottle of lemonade
threatening to pop its own lid off.
In
the best possible way, the people who gathered for Theatre Club
calmed my enthusiasm with a set of rigorous critiques that invited me
to see the place of privilege from which I’d watched the show. For
instance, one young woman described jolting at a phrase early in the
work that conveyed a particular white carelessness towards people of
colour; and an older woman, in the process of being diagnosed as
autistic, talked about the speed of Gloop’s delivery and how
difficult it was to process such an overwhelm of information at that
pace. We talked about satire, the difference between satire that
genuinely deconstructs and satire that unconsciously replicates, and
about theatre as a space in which – to borrow the thinking of
excellent artist Rajni Shah – ideas and difficult questions can be
“laid before” an audience, who gather to listen without the
imperative to speak or take action. If I hadn’t had to zoom for the
late train back to London, we could have kept going til midnight.
*
And
now another fortnight has passed and this still isn’t posted and
even though I had intended to keep the posts on here SHORT I’ll
just add on another little bit, about Leonora Carrington’s The
Hearing Trumpet, because I read it this week and am reeling. It’s
one of those books I’d heard a lot about, thanks to people often
name-checking it, but not heard anything specific about it, so
roughly every three pages I boggled at the turn of narrative events.
It’s told by Marian Leatherby, 92, toothless, with a gallant grey
beard, unable to hear anything below a bellow until she’s gifted a
hearing trumpet – a horn that welcomes sound in – by her
similarly aged and seemingly decrepit friend Carmella. On sight
Marian recognises the “infinite possibilities” of the horn, and
while at first what she hears is the ordinary violence and
selfishness of humanity, through it she slowly accesses another
world, of magic and goddesses and furious anarchic politics. I sort
of want to retype half the book, marvelling over individual phrases,
the language is so exuberant and vivid and funny and the ideas so
inventive and sly, but I’m going to limit myself to this slip of
conversation between Marian and Carmella, towards the end of the
story:
“It
is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all
obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves
‘Government!’ The word, I expect, frightens people. It is a form
of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy.”
“It
has been going on for years,” I said. “And it only occurred to
relatively few to disobey and make what they call revolutions. If
they won their revolutions, which they occasionally did, they made
more governments, sometimes more cruel and stupid than the last.”
“Men
are very difficult to understand,” said Carmella. “Let’s hope
they all freeze to death. I am sure it would be very pleasant and
healthy for human beings to have no authority whatever. They would
have to think for themselves, instead of always being told what to do
and think by advertisements, cinemas, policemen and parliaments.”
The
whole book is written in this tone of butter-wouldn’t-melt
innocence and eyebrow-raised perspicacity. It’s also whirlingly,
waftingly poetic: to quote another favourite, bewildering line, to
read it is like basking in “a mist of white ginger perfume which
issued from the beak of an embalmed cuckoo”. Time collapses along
with the structures of Western society, and the alternative
Carrington offers, co-inhabited by crones and werewolves and swarming
bees, is at once absurd, profoundly earnest, and infinitely
preferable to how we live now. I think of The Hearing Trumpet as a
manual for the future, to be consulted as oracle, bible, instructions
for insurrection, and guide to survival as the environmental
catastrophe unfolds.
